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We continued working with Pygame Zero this week, we began by getting everyone up to date with where we were with the game. I forgot to mention we were following the tutorial at https://pygame-zero.readthedocs.io/en/stable/introduction.html. We then changed the screen size and added a score to make our game more fun.

Next week we will add some elements to make our game more difficult and even more fun.

This week in the Bodgers group we started working with Pygame Zero. Pygame Zero allows us to write our own games quickly and easily by doing a lot of the work involved in setting up and running a game in the background. This allows us to focus on the more creative aspects of the game.

You will have to install Python and Pygame Zero if you’re going to use Pygame Zero at home, details on how to do this are in my slides. A few of us had installation problems on Saturday, so don’t worry if you have issues we will help sort it out when we return after the break.

We started of this week’s session by looking at the recent Soyuz rocket launch which was to send two people to the ISS. During the launch one of the booster rockets failed and the launch had to be aborted. Both crew members, astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin, escaped without injuries.

In the Bodgers group, we’ve been working on code for the International Space Station. To do this we are using on online Sense Hat emulator, the Sense Hat is a special piece of hardware designed to be deployed with a Raspberry Pi on the ISS.

Hello again everybody.
This week in the Bodgers group we started working on our code for the Mission Zero Challenge.

We began by writing a simple text message on the 8×8 full-colour LED display, then we changed the text and background colours. We then coded a picture by assigning a colour to each of the 64 LEDs on the display. We finished the session by taking a quick look at using the temperature sensor to read the temperature. Here are my slides from this week day 2.
Next week we will recap what we covered this week and we will start to personalise our code for the challenge.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of fun videos on how the Astro Pi computers got to the ISS.

This week we got things off to a flying start with Bodgers Bingo where the Bodgers had to look out for various phrases as I went through a very long slideshow that introduced them to what we do in the Bodgers group, it went very well with lots of Starburst and Chewits for everyone. My slides are here Day 1 (PDF).

We are going to start of the year by working on the Astro Pi Mission Zero Challenge in which the Bodgers will use a Raspberry Pi Sense Hat to write a greeting and display the temperature inside the International Space Station to the astronauts on the ISS. Here are the guidelines for Mission Zero Astro_Pi_Mission_Zero_Guidelines_2018_19 (PDF).

If you’re interested in buying a Raspberry Pi I’d recommend the following sites:

As you may remember from before Christmas Kevin, Zack and Barry won a prize in the Raspberry Pi Pioneers competition, part of that prize was an invitation to Coolest Projects UK which was held in London last Saturday.

The first thing that struck us when we got there was how small the event was, there was about forty projects there, compared to Coolest Projects in the RDS. However this is the first time that Coolest Projects has been run in the UK so it’s a very good start. We also noticed that at least half the projects were hardware based which reflects the fact that there are more Raspberry Jams etc. than CoderDojos in the UK.

The day started with us setting up our “Piggy In The Middle” project, followed by a very nice speech by Philip Colligan. The lads then demoed their project to the public while they were waiting for the Judges. After the judging was finished there were science shows by Greg Foot and Neil Monteiro as well as stands to keep the kids entertained, Zack and Kevin really enjoyed the huge version of Connect 4 that was there. In what has now become Coolest Projects tradition for Kevin and Zack they had their picture taken again with Philip Colligan CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Then it was time for the results, the Mobile category award went to Meriem Ait Ziane for her app of healthy eating recipes and advice as well as support for diabetic people and a personalized diet plan according to your health conditions.

The Games category was won by Hamdan Syed and Amiyan Ezdi. The game they coded is called Calorie Challenge, which challenges you to remember the amount of calories in each meal/snack.

The Website award went to George Hart for his project called “Educelevate”. He designed the website to educate children of all ages on various topics.

The Scratch category was won by to Gabriella Jenkins and Liya John for their game “Toad Ahoy”.

The Hardware category went to Avye Couloute for her project: Voice O’tronik Bot. We were all very impressed by both Avye and her project and were delighted to see her win.

This week we took a break from hardware and we looked at Pygame Zero. Pygame Zero is for creating games quickly and with fewer lines of code than would be used with Pygame. It is intended for use in education, so we can learn basic programming without needing to understand the Pygame API or how to write an event loop.

Pygame Zero is designed for the Raspberry Pi but it can be installed on other systems, we used Windows without much hassle. It comes installed on the Raspberry Pi already if you have a recent version of Raspian. To install on windows open a command prompt and type:

pipinstallpgzero

You may need to install Pip if you didn’t install it when you installed Python. To do this go to Control Panel/Settings and then Add/Remove Programs, scroll down and click on Python then click on modify, tick the Pip check box and save your changes.

To run your code from Idle or any other IDE you need to add two lines to your code, at the beginning before any other code you need:

importpgzrun

and at the end of your code put:

pgzrun.go()

We will be using Pygame Zero for graphical input/output in our projects but if you want to have a go at writing a game, CodeConjuring’s Froggit youtube tutorials are a good place to start.

25 March 2018 is the deadline if you would like to enter Coolest Projects, which will take place in Dublin on 26 May. You can find out information and register here: http://coolestprojects.org/

We have had lots of great participation from CoderDojo Athenry at Coolest Projects in the past few years, from our youngest members to our oldest, in all of our groups. People who enter find it a fun and rewarding day.